The cyber attack on the city of Atlanta has been described as “boring” by The Atlantic and “lame” by The Onion, but this major attack has paralyzed city government for the past week and destroyed multiple years of city government documents. Some city departments are still struggling and are reverting to paper and hand-processing it in order to mitigate the chaos.
In a statement, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms described the attack as “this is a massive inconvenience to the city, it is not life and death.” But, in the same statement she described the attack as a “gaping wound.”
”What we want to make sure of is that we aren’t putting a Band-Aid on a gaping wound. We want to make sure that we take the appropriate steps,” she said.
America is a digital society and attacking our networking infrastructure could be devastating. The ransom attack on Atlanta is just a taste of what the middle-part of the 21st century will be like unless our country takes cyber threats — from our elections to power grid to emergency call system to city business — seriously.
Most Americans outside of the Atlanta-region seem unaware of the scale of the attack. I live in the Pacific Northwest, for example, and didn’t find out until this weekend. I’ve tried to piece together information about this cyber attack and the other network security vulnerabilities threatening the United States below the fold.